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Sunday, March 3, 2013

Feature: My Top Five Favorite Articles from Brain Pickings (So far…)

Good Day, Folks!

Happy March 3rd! I’m excited about this month,
and it actually has little to do with my birthday, which is March 26th by
the way! March is about spring and spring means new beginnings and new
beginnings are what I’m all about this season. Begin anew and finish, of
course. I have a list of many projects that I want to finish, and I’m marking
March with a big fat X to get it all done. My music of choice this month has an
epic grand sound that makes me brave –think E.S. Posthumus, Immediate, Hans
Zimmer, and many more. Onward and forward!

via animals.howstuffworks.com

However, enough of my rambling, I want to feature a website
today that has tingled my creativity and turn the dial high on my inspiration
meter. I’m talking about Brain Pickings, and you’ve probably already heard of
it. In a nutshell, Brain Pickings offers delightful servings of inspiration,
advice, and thought-provoking articles from artistic and intellectual legends
of the past and artists and intellectual from the now. It is a truly awesome
website that I highly recommend you follow and support. Anyway, I wanted to feature five of my
favorite Brain Pickings articles so far. Enjoy!! (These selections are ordered
randomly.)

1.

How to Write with
Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word by Maria Popova.
http://bit.ly/13MF7JH

In this article, writers aspiring for greatness receive ageless
advice from Vonnegut on the craft of writing, which includes creating a voice
that moves readers, makes them care, and most importantly, keeps them reading your work. My favorite is this:

“Keep it Simple

As for your use of language: Remember that
two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote
sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.
‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three
letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as
intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence
in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point
in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three
words do. Simplicity of language is not only
reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within
the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created
the heaven and earth.’”

This list of advice from many great sources helps the
wanderer in the desert of no dreams and confusion take hold of a branch leading
to a spring that was within our weary traveler from the beginning. My favorite is the Holstee
Manifesto, which is on the lower right bar of this blog.

“This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If
you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you
don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of
your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you
love.”

&

“Open your mind, arms, and heart to new things and people,
we are united in our differences. Ask the next person you see what their
passion is, and share your inspiring dream with them. Travel often; getting
lost will help you find yourself. Some opportunities only come once, seize
them.”

Always on the prowl for writing advice, I found these
letters from Fitzgerald to an aspiring writer in her second year of college and to his daughter, Scottie, compelling and enlightening. These excerpts from the
letters stuck with me the most:

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions,
not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences
that you might tell at dinner. ”

&

“But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer
his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as
tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages
for people to see.”

&

“If have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever
said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way
to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say
and the way of saying it blend as one matter –as indissolubly as if they were
conceived together.”

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’ve never heard of
novelist Amelia E. Barr until I came upon this article who knows how long ago.
However, I did bookmark the page, and when I finished reading it again, I
remembered why I liked it so much. With my focus on super-achievement, dreams,
and perseverance, Barr turns the light on in many dark spaces concerning the
simplest things. I am partial to advice number six, which is pretty close to
the mantra of my blog! Number 9 is a gem too: be cheerful.

“6. Everything good needs time. Don’t
do work in a hurry. Go into details; it pays in every way. Time means power for your work. Mediocrity is always
in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with
consideration. For genius is nothing
more nor less than doing well what
anyone can do badly.” (Bold emphasis mine.)

&

“9. Don’t fail through defects of
temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One
of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with
a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to
prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful;
there is no beatitude for the despairing.”

This article surprised me—pleasantly of course. What I
thought would be a list of stuck-up attitudes to uphold or access to resources
afforded by wealth ended up stating qualities found in endless reservoir of our
hearts. These are some of my favorite lines take from the various numbers:
Cultured people…

“They do not pose, they behave in the
street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades.
They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on
others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than
talk.”

&

“They do not disparage themselves to
rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so
that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,”
or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap
effect, is vulgar, stale, false….”

&

“The truly talented always keep in
obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov
has said that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.”

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